Why Public Relations and Media Outreach is key for long-term business success, not just for building sales
Running a media campaign needs to have a clear focus if you are to reap the rewards. Having clarity in your key commercial goals or corporate challenges will help you identify where you can use PR to provide additional value.
Check our blog - Why do a PR campaign - for more about the value versus cost of PR.
Here, we look at the types of press releases and short campaigns you can activate to support wider areas of your business, moving beyond short-term sales to how you can build your brand and industry awareness.
20 reasons for your press releases
1. Build your brand
2. Build credibility and trust in your business
3. Improve your reputation
Third party endorsement and mentions driven by media coverage will provide additional authenticity to your value proposition, key messages and corporate values. The reputation of your company or brand can be a deciding buying factor. You will want to focus on tapping into the media channels and market demographic that will best help you achieve these goals; consider if specialist and trade media or national news and broadcast will better serve your goals.
Building brand awareness increases the value of your brand, encouraging word of mouth recommendations and repeat business. By tracking your website traffic against your press release activity, you’ll see spikes and uplift in traffic from organic search or direct traffic, and from referrals in the news articles.
Be clear with how you want to build your brand and what you want to be recognised for. Consider the role that reviews, interviews, thought leadership and competitions may play in achieving your core objectives.
4. Scale your business
5. Secure more funding
6. Prepare to sell your business
PR adds value - it is speaking to a network and audience that you don’t own. You are Earning this attention. By achieving more visibility and awareness you secure more recognition to help you enter new markets, expand your presence, be recognised by investors. Brand value contributes to the overall value of your business; a strong brand is an investment in your longer-term sales pipeline.
Here you really want to be sharing business success, communicating key milestones like expansion into new markets, growth of customer-base, or new patents and technology. Provide wider commercial insights, like business revenue performance, forecast growth, or your own data to depict the trends emerging in the market.
7. Management change
8. Corporate culture
Communicating business success, growth and development to the media and achieving coverage in relevant titles will connect with stakeholders including employees, investors and partners. The more positive the coverage, the more favourable these stakeholders will feel towards the performance and culture of your business.
Having a strong reputation and standing in the industry and wider markets will enable you to drive corporate culture change by more widely communicating your values and commitments to the market. You can then use the media coverage, which you’ve earned, as your mouthpiece to reach the audience through a third-party, improving the impartiality of the messages.
Clever placement of interview opportunities with senior executives speaking about the strategic direction, communicating business success and growth, or sharing insights to the internal investments made with the business - all these will help your employees to see you are openly communicating change.
9. Find talent/recruitment
10. Find industry partnerships
PR furnishes your company with attention, especially from those who are closely watching the industry. Professionals will always be looking for their next career opportunity, and when looking for specialist skills or specific experience, having the industry recognition and communicating your wider vision and mission, will capture their interest as potential employees. This inevitably provides access to a wider talent pool if people recognise your business. Check out our blog - The power of communication in HR and Recruitment - for more information.
So too for partnerships. As you look to enter new markets, increase indirect sales, or build your brand, the more influential the partner, the greater the opportunity for your business. Partners can be a source of new sales, and they’ll be looking for a mutually beneficial partnership - by investing in PR you are demonstrating your investment in the market and commitment to your wider industry vision.
11. Prepare the market
12. Launch a new product
13. Drive sales leads
14. Reduce the sales cycle
Product launches have had to get more creative to avoid the obvious sales pitch, however PR is a great opportunity to achieve product placement, product reviews and references to be considered by buyers. Sharing industry insights, consumer trends, customer wins, success stories and innovations can secure new leads and more efficiently communicate your value proposition and impact, helping improve the urgency of the buyer and reduce the sales cycle.
Furthermore, if you are preparing to launch a new product that has undergone huge investment and may be an innovation to the sector, you will want to prepare the market for your launch. Begin to communicate key messages to educate the market on your forthcoming product. This can be achieved through business development announcements, surveys insights, and thought leadership.
15. Build your website’s Domain Authority
16. Improve SEO results
17. Drive website traffic
18. Utilise third-party content for social media outreach
Once called Digital PR but now an essential part of any PR strategy, achieving online mentions - preferably with a link, but without is still beneficial - can help boost your overall online performance.Coverage can be on news sites, blogs, community forums, or social media, from journalists or influencers.
Back links to your website on a third-party channel that speaks to your audience should increase traffic to your site and help improve your Domain Authority, whilst mentions without links may correlate with an increase in search traffic as people Google your brand as a result of reading about it. Improving your Domain Authority and overall traffic with interested visitors interested in your brand will help boost your search engine ranking, in turn driving your site higher in future search results.
The more mentions, the more visibility, the greater the traffic. Just be sure to focus your energies and investments on your target buyer audience, otherwise you risk increasing the bounce rate and devaluing your achievements.
19. Crisis management
20. Damage control
Use the media as a voice piece to communicate your core messages to manage potential or existing crises. Share updates on the situation with the media, providing clear guidance on your next steps. And take the opportunity to humanise the situation and add compassion to your position - this will begin to alleviate negative feelings consumers and buyers may be experiencing.
Hays Travel took to Facebook in April 2020 to apologise for their failure at supporting their customers during the first wave of the Covid lockdown, posting a video explaining how they would resolve the situation. The positive sentiment towards the company rebounded and continued to grow as a result of this initiative
One thing often overlooked by companies providing response statements to damaging situations is not providing the solutions and the steps the company will take to resolve the situation. This is key to presenting an organised front, and gaining some trust back to your brand - it won’t negate all the bad sentiment, but will aid in your brand’s reputation recovery.
Want to know more about PR? Check out our other blogs - Why a press release?
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